tips

How-To: Remove a rear-view mirror button

How-To: Remove a rear-view mirror button

Awhile back, I wrote about co-opting the awesome glue used to mount rear-view mirrors for hobby projects. An interested reader e-mailed me a couple weeks later asking if I knew how to remove a rear-view mirror button from a windshield, which I didn’t. Several people have reported that trying to forcibly remove the metal button from the glass can actually break a divot of glass out of the windshield. I was therefore not optimistic, but we talked a little about the idea of using an organic solvent combined with sharp lateral pressure parallel to the glass. She experimented a bit, and, what do you know, eventually succeeded! Here’s her report:

Make and Mend tricks from Tim Anderson

Make and Mend tricks from Tim Anderson

When I was editing The Best of Instructables, one of my favorite authors in the book was Tim Anderson, who also edits our regular “Heirloom Technology” column in MAKE. Tim has hundreds of Instructables, many of them collections of time-saving, energy-saving, make-do, and kludgey-cool repair tips. Here are some excerpts from his Tips articles related […]

How-To: Restore the color of old Lego bricks

How-To: Restore the color of old Lego bricks

Turns out the yellowing of old ABS plastic is due to degradation of bromine-containing fire retardants which are added to the plastic during manufacture, which release elemental bromine, causing the yellow color. Shining UV light on the gel accelerates the decomposition of the fragile oxygen-oxygen bond in the peroxides it contains, generating reactive hydroxyl radicals which scavenge the free or loosely-bound bromine in the plastic that causes discoloration.